Open CallsComments Off on FIWARE Accelerators: open calls are closing!

Oct262014

At this point, we are sure that you all know what the Accelerator Programme is about; but, just in case you have not heard of this before, let us recall that it is an effort, co-funded by the European Commission, to encourage digital innovation all throughout Europe. For that purpose, 16 international entities (accelerators) have been chosen to select SMEs and entrepreneurs. These will receive not only funding, but also coaching, mentoring and support by technical and business experts. But apart from that, FIWARE technologies will facilitate the creation of their digital businesses, by offering a set of building blocks that can be combined and, thus, build a new app.

Of course, each and every one of the accelerators has its own requirements to apply and present your proposal. You can find more information in our webpage or you can contact us through any of our social media or means of contact. FIWARE Accelerators are already receiving projects and working on their selection, but some of them will close their open calls soon. Do you want to know all the details of their open calls and dates? Then, keep reading!

The closing dates of the accelerators are as follows:

FI-ADOPT (Until 30 Oct 2014)

FICHe (Until 31 Oct 2014)

EuropeanPioneers (Until 31 Oct 2014)

SOUL-FI (Until 31 Oct 2014)

IMPACT (Until 7 Nov 2014)

SmartAgriFood (Until 15 Nov 2014)

CreatiFI (Until 30 Nov 2014)

FI-C3 (Until Nov 2014)

FInish (Until Nov 2014)

FABulous (Until Nov 2014)

SpeedUP! (Until 10 Dec 2014)

CEED Tech (Until 15 Dec 2014)

Finodex (Until 19 Dec 2014)

frontierCities (Until 15 Jan 2014)

INCENSe (Until 15 Jan 2014)

FRACTALS (Until 28 Feb 2014)

And, what can an accerator do for you? Let's take as an example one of them, European Pioneers, which is closing its open call this week! Developers, do not miss this opportunity, because it can be your next step into the future of your business!

Challenges, eventsComments Off on FI-Guardian: Smart Monitor for Adverse Events – winners of Smart City Challenge at Campus Party Brazil

Mar192014

"The desire to contribute to the reduction of impacts from the adverse events on the lives of people and the love for the technology" these are the reasons that lead me and my teammates to develop solutions to assist citizens and government to face, together, adverse circumstances such as natural disasters.

Due to global climate changes, researches show that adverse events of this nature will become more frequent and more intense in a near future. It means that we, citizens of the world, are increasingly exposed to risk situations.

Three years ago, we watched on TV many events taking place around the world related to natural disasters and severe weather circumstances, but it seemed far away from us, residents of a town called Nova Friburgo, located in the mountainous region of the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

But, all of a sudden, in January 2011, our region and especially our city, became the scenario of the worst natural disaster ever occurred in Brazil. At that time, unfortunately, thousands of people died and among them, some close friends and their relatives.

So, we realized that those researches were not only warnings of trends, but now a reality!

As we went deeper into our analysis, we observed that not only our city was unprepared, but a large number of cities around the world, in fact, are unprepared as well.

At that time, I asked a question to myself: “How technology could be used to help us in situations like that?”

One year later, my teammate Viviane Lessa and I coordinated the development of a system for the local government that could use free SMS messages to guide and warn the citizens about risk situations. A public-private partnership was built to promote the development of the solution. This system was published to citizens in February 2012 and it can be accessed through the link: www.alertaviacelular.com.br

However, the idea of a more complete system has always been present in our minds, the development of a more robust solution passed through a series of technological prerequisites and infrastructure that we did not have. So, for our great happiness and surprise, we discovered the FI-WARE project when we went to Campus Party site to get tickets for the event.

It was great to explore the catalogue of "Generic Enablers" and the infrastructure of FI-LAB with the instances, templates and so on. All of these resources were entirely aligned to the needs of our larger project. We did not hesitate to apply the FI-Guardian project on Smart Cities Challenge, even without having any prior experience with this environment. FI-LAB, Mashups, Widgets, workspaces, instances, GEs, etc.. all of this was new to us but we realized how it could help us to build the working prototype of our idea.

When we received the information that FI-Guardian had been selected in the first phase of the competition we were very excited but very worried too. "And Now ?" I thought. "Will we be able to develop a prototype in time for the competition, even without experience with the FI-WARE technologies?"

We had the project design, but we did not know the technology. So, I organized the team, dividing the execution and researches tasks. Our knowledges were shared and at the end of 2 weeks of hard work we got the working prototype done for the challenge!

We asked for help to the technical staff of the FI-WARE and we were promptly oriented. And here, we would like to thank the assistance of Tali, Fermín and Paco.

In fact, the FI-WARE environment allowed us to develop the FI-Guardian prototype ina very flexible, fast and dynamic way.

FI-Guardian Concepts

FI-Guardian is a Smart Monitor for Adverse Events. For FI-Guardian, adverse events are any kind of events that impact the quality of life of citizens or expose them to risk conditions.

In this sense, these events can be classified by categories, such as: Weather events and natural disasters, Chemical and radioactive, War and terrorism, Public Health, Public Safety, Infrastructure and urban mobility, etc.

For Campus Party Brazil 2014, in order to illustrate how FI-Guardian could implement its objectives, the category of "Weather Events and Natural Disasters" has been chosen.

Fi-Guardian has 4 main objectives:

Improve monitoring related to adverse events

Enlarge communications channels

Fortify alert systems

Promote interoperability

Objective #1: To improve monitoring, FI-Guardian collects data from official institutions of monitoring, such as INEA, CEMADEN, INPE, etc. (examples from Brazil) and grants the cities an opportunity to expand the control, locally, from installing new city sensors network. All information is presented together, sharing the same workspace and maps. The cities can define new set points and new event detection rules, according to their needs and specific emergency protocols. IBM Proton techonology (CEP GE) is used to build a Smart Event Process Network (EPN).

Objective #2: The second objective is to enlarge communications channels. It aims to improve communications in 4 directions: citizens to citizens, citizens to public services, public services to citizens and public services to public services. Here FI-Guardian is collaborative and, among other functions, provide a new way to citizens ask for help. Using mobile devices or desktop computers, citizens (in trouble) can ask for help digitally. The request is sent to the public authorities in a georeferenced format. The request is plotted on a Map of the public authorities, helping them to coordinate rescue actions with more efficiency.

Objective #3: After detecting a potential risk event, FI-Guardian aims to inform it to citizens. In this sense, there are many alert channels. Some of them are already implemented and others under development. The options are: mobile buzzers (mobile devices and desktops play audible buzzer sounds), voice guidance (depending on location the citizens are, they receive, for example, a voice personalized guidance with information about the nearest safe place to go or the best procedure to take at that moment), messages posted to emergency radio frequency, SMS, digital TV and fixed buzzers.

Objective #4: In order to promote interoperability with other systems, FI-Guardian exposes a restfull API. For example, this API is being used to integrate FI-Guardian to the SMS Alert system of the Nova Friburgo City in Brazil. (www.alertaviacelular.com.br).

FI-Guardian and the interest of public authorities in Brazil

After #CPBR7, we were invited to present the project to public authorities in Brazil. We attended local meetings and state meetings. We also presented FI-Guardian in an open event, held during the 1st conference on civil defense in Nova Friburgo city on 15 February 2014.

The solution has aroused real interest of public authorities and one question is always present: “When will the application be available to be used by citizens ?” We answer: “Although the prototype is fully functional, it is available only on FI-LAB. But, we will continue improving it with the objective of creating a robust application and make it available as soon as FI-WARE production environment is available”.

We are sure that solutions like FI-Guardian can and certainly will save lives!

Blog, Challenges, eventsComments Off on FoodLoop on participating and winning the Smart Business & Industry Challenge

Mar112014

Participating in Campus Party Brazil and connecting with so many people in the tech world, "beyond the pond", was an amazing experience for the FoodLoop team. We walked into the massive convention center Anhembi in Sao Paolo, a bit overwhelmed at first. After checking in, going through security, walking past hundreds of computers, many being occupied by gamers, others by people in all other aspects of technology, we found an open table. Our team sat down and got right to work.

We began to polish our presentation for the first round of the "Smart Business and Industry Challenge". We had entered a few months before and were honored to be selected as a finalist out of 600 applicants. In brief, FoodLoop is an app that brings info on discounted food prices, approaching the best before dates, to your smartphone in real time, saving customers money, saving retailers disposal fees and labor costs, and most importantly helping the environment by reducing senseless waste and act more resource efficient. Although FoodLoop has competed in events before, we were honored to be competing at this high level in the FI-Ware challenge.

Our first presentation went quite well in front of a panel of FI-Ware coaches. Through a question and answer session, they seemed to like the idea, and gave us a few suggestions of how we could improve and implement FI-Ware technology that adds value to our technical infrastructure and business model. After that we walked through the busy convention center and sat down together reflecting on the presentation and how we could improve for the final one.

The following nights leading up tot he 2nd presentation were late nights of working on the implementation of certain GE, improving the graphic user interface and networking with industry fellows like the guys from SAP South America. After all we were finally ready for the final presentation. We walked into the cool, air conditioned room, feeling confident and prepared. We presented, did a demonstration of the app, and answered any questions the evaluation committee had. It may not have been perfect, but we walked out of the room feeling good. All we could do now was wait.

On the day of the award ceremony, we were filled with excitement. We spoke with FI-Ware members, had a couple of brief interviews and took our team photo. As we walked to the stage, we could feel the excitement growing. We had put a lot of work into developing this app and the whole concept including marketing and business model backing it up, and nothing at that moment could be more exciting that winning a prize that could help us take it to the next level. As our name wasn't called for the 2 runner up spots, the tension grew. We knew we had a great idea, and have been working hard on developing it for over a year. Was that along with our two presentations and the intial first round submitted proof of concept this week enough? FoodLoop popped up on the screen before the presenter said it. All of our eyes lit up and we screamed out in happiness and accomplishment. We walked up to the stage feeling very honored and proud of ourselves. Afterwards we thanked the Fi-Ware team and judges.

Campus Party Brazil was an incredible experience. It was great to meet so many talented, skilled, and kind people. After the excitement of the award ceremony died down a bit, we began to realize that we have an incredible opportunity to take FoodLoop to the next level, and that the next year will be the hardest working on of outlives. And we could not be happier about that.

Blog, ChallengesComments Off on Selected teams for the FI-WARE Challenges at Campus Party Brazil 2014

Jan092014

Find out who are the 40 outstanding teams that have presented ideas for Smart City and Smart Business internet applications with FI-WARE. Only the 40 teams below (out of nearly 700 submissions from all over the globe) will compete in the finals at Campus Party Brazil 2014!

Here is the list of teams (team representative followed by the name of the idea) that will compete for the final prizes.

SMART CITIES

1. Marian Claudiu Moldovan, with Spring

2. Marco Vereda Manchego, with ApparKart

3. Sergio Chamorro, with CityBrain

4. Natalia Vicente, with TagTagCity

5. Ignacio García, with Wecollect

6. Daniel Caro, with Urban M

7. Álvaro Romero Izquierdo, with SmartBox

8. Claudio Esposito, with SocialMarket

9. Burak Hançerli, with Chaos System

10. Antonio Sánchez, with QuickParking

11. Alberto Martín Alcubierre, with Smart Zity

12. Isabela Medeiros, with Entry

13. Christian Moller, with VASEC

14. Carlos Adalberto Albarran, with SmartParking

15. Juan Manuel Romero, with CARES

16. Matteo Del Rio Lostal, with Smart Traffic

17. Daniel Lima, with La Urbo

18. Marcos Marconi, Viviane Lesa, with FI-Guardian

19. Daniel Menchaca, with Smart App City

20. Alejandro Santamaría Arza, with Sparky

SMART BUSINESS & INDUSTRY

1. Felix Joel López Salcedo, with Context

2. Sergio López, with Shake&Go

3. Stelios Sotiriadis, with Interact

4. Customer Support – Derick Leone, with Smart

5. Shane O’Sullivan, with, with Carbon Control

6. Florian Klemt, with Shelfz.com

7. Federico López, with Smart Taxi

8. Ottavio Sgrosso, withAppetitoo

9. Tatiana Orlova, with VPC

10. Nixon Rondon, with Cloud Industry

11. Edwin Marcelo Llauca Guallpa, with Kituris

12. David Lechon, with Smaheater

13. Christoph Müller-Dechent, with Foodloop

14. Joao Vieira, with GALVYAS

15. Diego Bonfim, with Ombudsman Office 2.0

16. Dmitrii Ignatev, with AmiCO

17. Jesus Martin, with MyCity4Me

18. Xavier Xao, with Wadjet

19. Carlos A. Albarrán, with SmartAdStore

20. Christian Ryder, with FoneSense

Thanks to all the people that have participated in this first phase of the Smart Cities and Smart Business Challenges! If you haven't been selected you will have another opportunity with the next FI-WARE Challenges we will announce in February.

See you in Sao Paulo! Where we will not only have the finals of the FI-WARE Challenges, we will celebrate technology at Campus Party with conferences, workshops, round tables and a couple of fun surprises for campuseros at the FI-WARE Stand.

Stay tunned for more info on all our activities at Campus Party Brazil 2014!

You'll understand that the question can be both easy and a complex to answer. So we are going to try to help all of you interested in the apps that were developed in previous hackathons by addressing both ways of answering them.

So for the easy part: What were the winning apps? Who did them? Watch this short video about our days in Santander and don't miss the short explanation that the winners of that hackathon gave us right after the award ceremony.

Now that is simple and easy explanation. But maybe you are a developer and you really want to know more specific things about these apps, maybe a practical example of how FI-WARE can be used to create Smart City and Smart Business apps? Well: we've got a suprise for you tomorrow. Stay tunned!

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